Before I even opened my eyes, I could feel the ache living inside my body.
Not just tiredness, but the kind of exhaustion that settles into the muscles after carrying something heavy for too long. My body felt as though it had run a marathon in the night. Every part of me ached. There was a headache pressing behind my eyes, a soreness woven through my limbs, and beneath it all, a level of emotional fatigue so deep that even my grief felt tired.
For a moment, emotion rose through me like a wave threatening to break.
I thought I might cry.
But the tears never came.
I was too exhausted even for that.
Slowly, I opened my eyes to the pale light of the early morning and lay there for a moment between worlds — not fully rested, not fully awake. I had spent much of the night supporting a client moving through profound dysregulation, holding space for someone whose inner world felt like it was unraveling. And long after the conversation ended, my own nervous system struggled to return to stillness.
My forehead tightened as I wondered if caffeine would soften the headache.
I pulled myself from bed, and when my bare feet touched the wooden floor, it felt less like beginning a morning and more like standing at the base of a mountain I would now need to climb. The mountain was simply the day ahead of me.
As I moved quietly through my home preparing for the day, I began noticing something subtle but deeply revealing unfolding inside of me.
I was dismissing my own pain.
Not because I couldn’t feel it. I could feel it clearly.
But because the pain had come through something meaningful. Something sacred to me.
Supporting people through profound emotional experiences is deeply intertwined with the work I feel called toward in this life. While crisis itself is not the center of my work, when someone I hold space for enters a moment of collapse, I do not turn away from them. I stay. I help them navigate the storm when their inner world feels unbearable.
And somewhere inside myself, I had unconsciously decided that because I loved the work, I was not allowed to fully acknowledge its impact on me.
The realization stopped me completely.
I stood still in the middle of my kitchen as the awareness moved through me with startling clarity.
I was minimizing my own experience.
Not dramatically.
Not obviously.
But quietly.
Habitually.
Almost reverently.
As though my capacity to hold others somehow meant I should not need to honor the cost of holding so much.
I paused and softened inward, allowing myself to become deeply present with what was unfolding beneath the surface. I could feel that I was touching something ancient inside of myself, something far larger than this single morning.
And then the deeper truth arrived.
Being dismissive of my own pain was not strength.
It was not devotion.
It was not love.
It was a subtle form of self-abandonment.
The awareness did not land only in my mind. It landed directly in my nervous system like a truth my body had been waiting for me to finally acknowledge.
So I became curious.
Not from judgment.
Not from shame.
But from a genuine desire to understand myself more honestly.
Why was I so quick to minimize the impact that deeply emotional experiences had on me?
And almost immediately, another question emerged beneath it — the real question.
If this pattern existed here, where else did it exist?
The answer moved through me instantly.
Everywhere.
I saw how often I had spent my life overriding my own emotional reality in the name of resilience. How often I had met intensity with stoicism. How deeply I identified with the part of myself that could endure, persevere, hold steady, keep going.
The part of me that knew how to put her head down and carry impossible things without collapsing.
And I felt immense compassion for her.
Because that part of me had carried me through so much.
At first, I wondered if healing meant putting that part of myself down altogether. But as I sat with it more deeply, I realized that was not the truth.
The answer was not to abandon my strength.
The answer was to stop abandoning my tenderness.
To allow the part of me that honors impact to stand beside the part of me that carries capacity.
To hold both.
Strength and softness.
Devotion and honesty.
Resilience and reverence for my own humanity.
And so, as I moved through the rest of my day, I practiced something different.
I did not override the impact the experience had on me.
I did not shame myself for being affected.
I did not force myself to harden against my own exhaustion.
Instead, I witnessed myself gently.
I honored the part of me capable of holding others through devastation.
And I honored the part of me that also needed holding afterward.
Both were true.
And perhaps that, too, is part of healing:
remembering that even the ones who know how to hold others through darkness must also learn how to hold themselves with the same tenderness.